


Whipped

by mytea



Category: Batman (Comics), DCU (Comics)
Genre: Bad Flirting, Courtship, M/M, one line that makes it inappropriate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-13
Updated: 2016-04-13
Packaged: 2018-06-01 22:29:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6539041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mytea/pseuds/mytea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bruce wants Hal to work for it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Whipped

The second Sunday in March finds Hal sitting in the Watchtower lounge with his face on the table, watching Barry go to town on a box of grape soda donuts. It is twenty minutes before their monthly League meeting. The boring one, not born out of any mission or conflict, but regularly scheduled, featuring little else but debriefings and software updates and regulatory medical emergency contact renewals.

Hal is throwing up in his mouth a little, mostly because of the donuts, which look and smell revolting, but also because of the hangover, which is, coincidentally, also entirely Barry’s fault.

So he’s too tired to acknowledge Batman when he sweeps into the room, just one more dark and menacing shadow over his morning. It’s pointless anyway, because Bruce outside an argument is a brick wall that grunts sometimes.

Or so he’d thought.

“How do you take your coffee?” Batman grumbles, surprising him.

“What?” he asks, but it isn’t as if Bruce will repeat himself. “I already have coffee,” he adds, because for a crazy second he thinks Bats is offering to make him some. Then he remembers that Hell hasn’t frozen over yet today, and the coffee maker, for all the Watchtower’s advanced tech, has been broken for at least three weeks.

He feels the relentless chill in his spine that always accompanies the Bat’s stare downs, fading only when Bruce glances down at Hal’s coffee cup on the table.

Hal bites, because that’s what he always does when it comes to Bruce, and he really is kind of curious. He gestures with his cup, venti, and answers, “It’s just black. Double shot.”

He swears he sees Bruce’s lip curl, and there’s a pause. He’s about to snap, because it is too early for Batman’s ridiculous fucking moods when—

And it takes a while to process what he’s seeing. He even hears Barry stop eating, which is impressive.  It really is too early for this.

For Batman to be stealing his coffee.

Not stealing really. He sets it back down from where he took it after two gulps, right back into Hal’s fingers, still frozen around nothing.

He leaves without a word before Hal’s brain has caught up with him.

 --

They do not talk about it. Hal sometimes thinks about it when he’s lying in bed at night, but he thinks about everything and anything else when he’s in the shower and otherwise puts it out of his mind. He doesn’t dwell on it until a month later, just before the next League meeting, standing in line at the coffee shop across the street from his apartment in Coast City.

It occurs to him, as he’s replaying those few minutes in his head, that Bruce must not like black coffee. He can’t quite reconcile that idea with his image of Batman, curt and no nonsense to a fault, but it couldn’t have been the extra caffeine he was sneering at. 

Or was that just an automatic reaction to Hal himself? Because Barry had had a perfectly good, untouched macchiato sitting right there, if he’d been so desperate. Why not him? Why is it always Hal that has to deal with this shit?

He still doesn’t know what to make of it.

He orders his coffee with two creams and two sugars anyways.

\--

It’s too sweet. Hal sits at the break room table once again, glaring at it, wondering what the hell he was thinking. He’s only half listening to Barry, going on about Iris’s hair and Iris’s promotion and Iris’s new damn contact lens prescription, when the door slides open. 

His heart skips a beat, but he refuses to turn around.

 It doesn’t matter. The way Barry straightens out tells him who it is.

Bruce is standing by the table in a blink, long black fingers stretched out, just touching the top of Hal’s coffee. And he’s staring at him.

Waiting.

For permission?

This is too surreal, Hal thinks. He just nods. What the fuck else can he do?

Hal watches him lift the cup to his lips, like a slow motion video. Bruce takes a sip and pauses. There’s a quick exhale of breath that Hal thinks, incredulously, might just be a laugh.

“Closer,” he says and that’s all, before he’s passing it back to Hal.

“Jesus,” Hal groans, trying another taste and grimacing immediately, “If it gets any sweeter than this, I’m just going to get you your own.”

Bruce doesn’t miss a beat.

“You want to buy me coffee?” he asks, achingly casual.

It catches him off guard, although he absolutely set himself up for it.

“Well,” Hal begins after a long moment, voice coming out a little deeper than normal. He can feel a shift in the room, a shift in his body. His shoulders and his knees relax, fall open, and his eyes flit away and then back to Bruce. He senses the change more than he understands it. “If you insist on drinking mine.”

Bruce doesn’t have a response to that, at least not in words. He smirks a little and snatches Hal’s coffee again, brings it to his lips.

And Hal just has to focus on his breathing.

This was definitely almost probably officially flirting.

He knows it. Bruce knows it. Barry, who’s sitting across the table looking at them like someone looks at their pregnant high-school girlfriend’s Facebook feed, absolutely knows it.

Hal is…

Pretty okay with that.

Really okay with that.

“You’re going to have to tell me how you like it,” Hal says, and oh, how he loves saying it. He’s going to dream about saying it. Tonight he’ll be lying in bed with a hand on his cock remembering how it felt to say it. Tell me how you like it, Bruce, tell me how you want it.

There’s a spark in Bruce’s eyes that makes Hal wonder if he likes hearing it. 

“Too easy,” Batman replies, and he’s out the door again.

\--

Hal buys him coffee every week, and Bruce never refuses it. He gets through nearly a dozen unique combinations of lattes, cappuccinos, and mochas. He tries half-soy, light foam, no foam, and extra milk. He adds whip and caramel, shots of vanilla and hazelnut and sometimes both. He requests sprinkles of cinnamon and once, just sprinkles, which had made Clark snort his own coffee out his nose while Bruce maintained a perfect poker face.

Hal is walking into the café thinking, today, he’ll try something with butterscotch and extra whipped cream when he sees a familiar figure slouched at a table in a large green hoodie.

The man lifts his head immediately. He meets his eyes, and Hal gets that chill like he always does, recognizable, yet somehow infinitely changed from weeks ago.  

“Too much?” Bruce asks, when he stands up to meet him. He’s tugging at his sweater, having noticed Hal’s expression. Hal coughs, grins, and hopes his face isn’t as red as it feels.

“Not your color,” he lies, even though Bruce could pull off any color he pleased to. 

Bruce looks at him through his lashes, and damn, if that isn’t his new favorite view. He doesn’t even mind so much that he’s seeing right through him.

Hal turns away, so as to not cause a scene, and shoves his hands in his pockets.

“Are you finally taking pity on me?”

Bruce starts to speak, but he’s interrupted by the cashier, who calls them forward reluctantly. She recognizes Hal. She hates him and his complicated, nonsensical orders, but he doesn’t mind. His terrible reputation will be worth it. It’s already worth it, worth every glare and grimace and half-smile he’s gotten out of Batman. Every moment spent watching Bruce come out of a fog, waking up with each swallow and letting Hal see it.

“The meeting doesn’t start for another half hour,” Bruce says instead, walking to the counter. “Shall we have coffee here?”

Hal smiles and steps forward to listen closely to Bruce’s order. It is the first in a long list of things he’ll commit to memory.


End file.
